Table 1 provides examples of many addresses such as fax number, cellular telephone number, residence phone number, and electronic mail address which may be associated with a person.
TABLE 1 ______________________________________ Address Context ______________________________________ 201-835-9944 residence number 201-829-4416 business number 984-5837 fax number 764-4356 cellular number 829-6001 business voice-mail number thumper!jdoe electronic mail address ______________________________________
Table 2 lists some contexts in which information is stored about a person (e.g. business and residence), along with names appropriate for the contexts.
TABLE 2 ______________________________________ Name Context ______________________________________ John Doe, Speedwell Ave, Morristown, NJ residential John Doe, Bellcore, Applied Research business John Doe, Bellcore, Applied Research, 2145 business fax ______________________________________
Contexts are derived by partitioning the total name space into logically related portions, for example, by mode of communication. A name, as used herein, is a set of attributes for disambiguating a person in a particular context. For example, in the residential context, to disambiguate a person, the name may include the family name, given name, and residence address. A name in one context is usually not sufficient to uniquely identify a person in another context.
An address gives a physical location for a person in a network. In some contexts, databases exist to map from a name to an address. An example of such a database is a directory assistance database which is maintained by a public switched telephone company for mapping names to residential telephone numbers.
Generally, to establish a connection in a network such as the public switched telephone network, a subscriber must have either an address appropriate for the context of the connection, or a name that forms a key to search a database in the particular context, so that the desired address can be obtained. Thus, the above-described naming model currently in use in the telecommunications environment is quite rigid and does not help in cases where a name or address is known in one context but not in the desired target context. For example, a fully disambiguated name in a residential context is of no use in trying to find a person's business fax number.
With the proliferation of names and addresses, a telephone network architecture and connection routing method which can provide cross-media and cross-context name and address translation and connection routing is highly desirable. Examples of services which could be provided by cross-media and cross-context name and address translation and connection routing include: 1. calling a person's business phone by only specifying the residence number; 2. calling a person's cellular phone by only specifying the business number, and 3. sending an electronic document addressed by residence phone number by electronic mail.
To establish such services, a telecommunications network should include a database structure for performing name-to-address and address-to-address mappings. One possible way to establish such services is to create a set of service specific databases. However, this approach is quite cumbersome and does not easily allow deployment of unanticipated new services. Rather, it is desirable to provide a telecommunications network architecture including a unified database infrastructure for providing cross-media and cross-context services including new unanticipated services.
Another way for establishing cross-media and cross-context connections in a telecommunications network is to maintain a single super-database which contains all of the names and addresses of each subscriber. However, this approach is not technically or administratively practical. For privacy and administrative reasons it is not possible to collect all the names and addresses of a person in one place. For example, many businesses maintain their own mappings from name to phone, fax, and electronic mail numbers and are unwilling to release the information and propagate all changes to an external database. Similarly, cellular service providers and electronic mail providers may not want to give up information on the name-to-address mappings of their subscribers.
Another possibility for providing a telecommunications network and connection routing method for establishing cross-media and cross-context connections is to utilize a linking database. A linking database includes one entry per person and each entry comprises pointers to other databases which include more comprehensive information about the person. Thus, the linking database does not attempt to collect together comprehensive information about a person, but instead is a directory of directories.
Previous research has been directed to locating directory entries in distributed database systems. (See, ISO, "Information processing systems: open systems interconnection--the directory--overview of concepts, models and service," Draft Int'l Standard ISO 9594-1:1988; B. Lampson, "Designing a global name service," Proceedings of Fifth Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Computing, August 1986; D. Oppen and Y. Dalal, "The Clearinghouse: a decentralized agent for locating named objects in a distributed environment," ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, Vol. 1, No. 3, July 1983; L. L. Peterson, "The Profile Naming Service," ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol. 6, No. 4, November 1988.) However, none of these prior art studies have provided a satisfactory solution for linking together distributed entries for persons in multiple contexts to achieve cross-media and cross-context connections in a telecommunications network.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a telecommunications network architecture and connection routing method for establishing cross-media and cross-context connections.